Tuesday, May 13, 2008

1MB Text Messages is worth 7,489 Pesos

This boingboing post prompted me to calculate how much does 1MB worth of text messages cost:

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that's 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that's £374.49 per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

Substituting the amount of a text message (SMS) at 1 peso each, the cost of pers 1MB of text messages is 7,489 pesos. That's pretty expensive. Consider this: an 80GB Seagate Hard Disk costs around 1,900 pesos. If you are to fill that disk with text messages, it would cost you 599,120,000 pesos. (Thats 80 x 1,000 MB = 80,000 MB x 7,489). If you could send 1 text messages per second, it would take you 599.12 million pesos and 1,140 years of nonstop texting. Go figure.

Question: the quoted paragraph above was itself quoted from it's original quote. What do you call it, quoteqoute?

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memehopping:
1. boingboing.net - SMS data rate is 4x more expensive than data from the Hubble

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